“Our goal right now is the Rose Bowl. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what we’re working for every day. That’s what we’re trying to do, and that’s all we can expect right now.” — Cal quarterback Jared Goff to ESPN on Aug. 22.

True to Goff’s word, Cal played in the Rose Bowl. Unfortunately for the Bears, the game was just played at the Rose Bowl stadium and not in the actual bowl game. And true to form, Cal took a beating from UCLA. The loss dropped Cal to 1-5 on the season. Since Oct. 13 of last year, the Bears have gone 0-10 in games against FBS opponents.

Here’s what we know so far: Goff, Bryce Treggs and Chris Harper are good. The running game and the defense are not.

Combine Cal’s recent struggles with the surge of optimism that followed its narrow loss to Northwestern back on Aug. 31, and what you get is a rapidly heating hot seat for Sonny Dykes and Andy Buh. After the season opener, Cal fans believed their Bears were ready to compete in the Pac-12. Now, a winless Pac-12 season appears to be a more likely outcome in Berkeley.

Whether Cal squeaks out a win this season is irrelevant. The Bears are bad, and everyone knows it — a Pac-12 win or two won’t change that fact. What is important is that Cal stays patient.

I understand the frustration that comes with patience — I’m a Seattle Mariners fan, after all. Fans and players might want to win in the present, but for Dykes, the goal is sustained success. It’s why his decision to dismiss Chris McCain from the team was a wise one. There’s no doubt McCain’s absence hurts a struggling Bears defense in the short term. But Dykes understands that crafting his own culture at Cal, one separate from Jeff Tedford’s, is vital to his long-term success.

Like Frodo and Sam on the road to Mordor, the path to sustained success for Dykes won’t be without its bumps and bruises. It’ll also take time. And Dykes deserves time to rebuild a Cal program that Tedford dragged into the dumps, just as Buh deserves an opportunity to coach a defense that isn’t composed of second-stringers. Cal isn’t going to the Rose Bowl anytime soon, and firing Dykes or Buh won’t speed up the process.

I don’t suspect Dykes’ job to be in any danger. Firing a head coach after one season isn’t just unusual; it’s plain stupid. But as is the norm for 1-5 teams, a scapegoat is typically sought out. It’s why I anticipate Buh’s job could be in jeopardy, even if axing him isn’t a solution for the defense.

There was already a talent deficiency on that side of the ball prior to the season. Combine that with an injury bug spreading as quickly as pink-eye in a residence hall, and what you get is a defense surrendering north of 500 yards per game. I don’t know how good or bad a defensive coordinator Buh is, because he isn’t coaching a defense worthy of competing against Pac-12 offenses.

I’m not saying Dykes and Buh should be absolved of any blame. A coach’s primary goal is to win football games, and that clearly isn’t happening in 2013. But a fan’s job is to remain patient and keep some perspective, no matter how difficult that can be in a year like this.

Sean Wagner-McGough covers football. Contact him at swagnermcgough@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @seanjwagner.

The post Keep calm and carry on appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Blaine Ohigashi/The Daily Bruin/Courtesy

PASADENA, Calif. — On a first down in his own territory and up 17-0 early in the second quarter, UCLA quarterback Brett Hundley dropped back to pass, poised in a perfect pocket. Bruins wide receiver Damien Thigpen broke free of Michael Lowe’s man coverage and streaked down the field uncovered. Hundley spotted Thigpen and fired a bullet in his direction, but the surefire touchdown pass was under thrown.

Not much else broke right for Cal on Saturday.

On a clear and warm night at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., the Bruins handled the Bears, 37-10, in front of 84,272 fans.

The UCLA secondary smothered the Cal receivers and the defensive line manhandled the offensive line, holding the Bears to 4.0 yards per play. Meanwhile, Hundley and Co. capitalized on Cal’s poor tackling technique by repeatedly finding their skill position players in space on their way to racking up 325 yards in the first half. Hundley alone finished the game with 410 passing yards and three touchdowns.

“When we got pressure, Hundley did a good job of eluding it and keeping the plays alive,” said head coach Sonny Dykes. “It’s pretty much what he’s done his entire career. He’s a mobile guy and does a good job extending plays.”

As has been a constant trend for the Bears’ defense, the opening drive began inauspiciously. On the Bruins’ second play from scrimmage, Hundley located Jordan Payton on a post route in the middle of the field for a 43-yard gain to put UCLA in the red zone. But the Cal defense held strong, limiting the Bruins to three points. For the first time this season, the Bears stopped the opposing team from scoring a touchdown on their opening possession.

But any good news for Cal on defense was negated by their dismal offensive play. Goff felt constant pressure from the UCLA front seven in the first half and was unable to progress through his reads. Running back Khalfani Muhammad struggled to find open holes in the offensive line. As a result, the Bears went three-and-out on the first three drives and picked up only one first down in the first quarter.

Following Cal’s third straight three-and-out, the Bruins took over at their own 41-yard line with 6:54 remaining in the first quarter. After a Paul Perkins three-yard carry, the Bruins offense decided to screen pass the Bears to death. Play after play, Hundley found his receivers in the flats in one-on-one match ups. The Bears’ corners had no solution. UCLA marched down the field in less than two minutes; the drive culminated in an 18-yard touchdown pass to Devin Fuller, giving the Bruins the 10-0 edge.

“We haven’t been a particularly good open field tackling team,” Dykes said. “We just didn’t do a good job of making those open field tackles, particularly early in the game.”

UCLA tacked on another seven points at the start of the the second quarter on a one-yard touchdown run from Perkins. The Bears’ offense continued to struggle, going three-and-out once more on the ensuing drive. At this point in the game, punter Cole Leininger was Cal’s best weapon. A 49-yard punt from Leininger pinned the Bruins at their own 9-yard line, allowing the Bears to capitalize on a short field on the next possession and set up a Vincent D’Amato field goal, making the score 17-3. The defense made a stand on the next UCLA drive and the offense took over with 7:35 remaining in the second quarter.

A 12-play, 81-yard touchdown drive brought the Bears within seven and back from the brink of death. But Hundley and Co. did their best to ensure Cal remained in their grave, responding with a long touchdown drive of their own to increase their lead to 24-10 heading into the halftime break.

The game stayed within two scores until a Goff interception in Cal territory set up an easy 22-yard field goal for Bruins kicker Ka’imi Fairburn. Down 27-10 late in the third quarter, the Bears’ odds at pulling off an upset were slim.

“You know, it’s probably mainly on me if the offense doesn’t play well,” Goff said. “It’s probably my fault. We’ve got to play a lot better.”

Those odds shrank to virtually zero with a Fairburn field goal on the next drive, extending the lead to 30-10 heading into the fourth quarter.

Cal’s final nail in the coffin came with 9:07 left in the fourth quarter when Goff fumbled the ball away on fourth-and-goal, turning the ball and the game over to the Bruins.

“We just struggled to execute basic plays tonight, for whatever reason,” Dykes said. “We haven’t put a solid game together this year, where both sides of the ball play well. We’re learning.”

Michael Rosen covers football. Contact him at mrosen@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @michaelrosen3.

The post Cal football falls to No. 11 UCLA, 37-10, at the Rose Bowl appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Tony Zhou/Staff

The last time Cal head coach Sonny Dykes visited the Rose Bowl was in 2009. There, he watched U2 perform the most successful leg of the 360° tour.

“It was pretty awesome,” he said. “Hopefully, this trip is as fun as the last one.”

On Saturday, Dykes gets another chance to enter the iconic Pasadena venue — for a very different reason — when Cal (1-4, 0-2 in the Pac-12) takes on a surging UCLA squad at 7:30 p.m.

For the first time since 2005, the Bruins have a perfect 4-0 record. In their first three contests, they eviscerated opponents by 104 combined points. During a game that was played in honor of deceased teammate Nick Pasquale last month, UCLA left Nebraska stupefied by scoring 38 unanswered points in the third quarter, eventually earning a road win by 20 points.

The effort was as much a result of the team’s 504 yards of total offense as the defense’s ability to make key stops.

“That showed a lot of character for their team,” Dykes said. “In Lincoln, that’s a tough place to play … it’s rocking and rolling. For their guys to keep on playing and expect something good to happen shows a lot of maturity.”

Maturity, it seems, is what the Bears lack. Turnovers and fumbles, which Dykes calls the signs of a young squad, have plagued the team. Cal has put the ball on the ground 15 times, nine of which were recovered by opponents.

In the past two outings alone, the Bears racked up seven fumbles.

“That’s something we’ve consistently done this year,” Dykes said. “The result is we haven’t had a lot of chances to win football games.”

Nothing has killed Cal’s chances against UCLA quite like a firestorm of injuries. The defense in particular has been ravaged, with nearly two-thirds of the starters listed in the fall camp depth chart now unable to play.

On Tuesday, Dykes announced that defensive end Brennan Scarlett would most likely burn his redshirt this year after prolonged recovery from a hand injury last spring. Starting corner Stefan McClure underwent surgery Wednesday for a knee injury he sustained last weekend against Washington State.

“We’ll practice somebody and bring him along, and he’ll make progress,” Dykes said. “Then, all of a sudden, there’s a setback, and then we move somebody else to that position, and we have to start all over again.

“Every time we take a step forward, we take two steps back with an injury.”

Cal’s response has been to simplify the defensive scheme even more so new starters can learn and execute plays quickly.

Such a decision, however, is a double-edged sword, as it only makes it easier for an opposing team to exploit possible matchups — especially in the secondary, which sees a conveyor belt of new players each week.

“When your scheme gets a little vanilla, then people can find you,” Dykes said.

UCLA’s secondary is everything Cal’s isn’t: confident, steady and intact. In last week’s conference opener against Utah, the Bruins’ defense snagged six interceptions to hang on to a 34-27 win in Salt Lake City.

Such stats leave little room for error for quarterback Jared Goff, whose 504 passing yards last weekend broke Cal’s single-game record.

If anything, the true freshman is an echo of UCLA’s Brett Hundley circa 2012, full of promise and crazy stats. Last year, Hundley racked up school records in passing and total offense, in addition to setting a new NCAA mark in passing yards by a freshman (with 3,745).

With 1,821 yards already under his belt, Goff could break Hundley’s NCAA record. Yet the Cal playmaker’s inexperience still shows, whereas Hundley has only solidified his versatility. The redshirt sophomore has completed 65 percent of his throws for 1,059 yards thus far, in addition to rushing for an average of 60.5 yards a game.

But Goff doesn’t see Saturday’s matchup as a battle between him and Hundley.

“It’s never a quarterback versus a quarterback,” Goff said. “It’s just a team versus a team.”

Annie Gerlach covers football. Contact her at agerlach@dailycal.org

The post Cal football and No. 11 UCLA to clash in Los Angeles Saturday night appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In Tuesday’s weekly press conference, head coach Sonny Dykes noted that despite his team’s poor play and 1-4 record this year, he has begun to see signs of life — signs that have led him to believe things are at least headed in the right direction.

And for his sake — and his defensive coordinator’s sake — he needs those signs to start showing up on Saturdays.

Now more than six weeks into the season, the honeymoon period has ended between Dykes and his new fan base. The sheen has worn off. People are no longer willing to get excited about the fact that change happened but now want to see some positive results from said change.

Simply put, we’re entering the stage where we’re able to start looking at the Dykes regime with a more critical eye, no longer blinded by the shine coming off the new coat of paint.

You don’t need to look too far past the team’s record to understand why some impatience is beginning to brew. Yes, the team has had to trudge through what has probably been the toughest schedule in the nation. And yes, having nine of 11 defensive starters miss time with injuries certainly hasn’t made things easy on the new staff.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t be seeing flashes of life. Obviously, new things take time to reach their full potential, and jumping the gun to call the new coaching staff a failure would still be irrational at this point in time.

Yet, nearing the halfway point in the season, it’s time to see some evidence of why things are going to get better.

And to an extent, Cal’s passing game has provided that beacon. Jared Goff has looked every bit the part of the quarterback of the future, while Bryce Treggs and Chris Harper have proven they can be elite wide receivers. That trio looks like it could be dangerous for a very long time.

But throwing the ball for 500 yards a game isn’t going to be enough every time. Victories in college football are produced by one simple formula: establishing a consistent running game while preventing your opponent from doing the same. So far in 2013, the Bears haven’t even hinted at an ability to do either.

Averaging less than three yards a carry while giving up nearly five and half yards to opponents is a guaranteed formula for failure.

Things are unlikely to change dramatically against UCLA, a team that averages more than 300 yards on the ground per game. But the Bears don’t have to become a defensive juggernaut all of a sudden and impose their will at the line of scrimmage. Just show me something to make me believe that things will eventually get better — and preferably sooner rather than later.

Show me some sound, solid fundamentals in tackling. Show me some smart defensive pursuit angles. Show me some creative blitz packages. Show me you get off the field on third down every now and then.

I don’t need to see championship-caliber football yet. I just want to see evidence of sound fundamentals as a product of improved coaching. Given Cal’s injuries on defense and along the offensive line, it’s looking increasingly likely that even eclipsing last year’s three-win bar might be a lofty goal. But that doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that the Cal football team spends the rest of 2013 convincing its fan base things will be better in 2014. Because that’s all we want. And in all likelihood, that’s probably the best that Cal can do.

Connor Byrne covers football. Contact him at cbyrne@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @ctbyrne91.

The post Show me something, please appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Daniel Haidermota/Staff

Sonny Dykes is only five games into his inaugural season, and his defense has surrendered 225 points. To this point, it has captured the attention and drawn the ire of Cal fans. But instead of focusing on that, let’s focus on the team’s passing game and, more importantly, appreciate it, because it’s a thing of beauty.

Molded from the minds of Cal coach Sonny Dykes and offensive coordinator Tony Franklin, the Bear Raid offense has turned quarterback Jared Goff into the nation’s third-leading passer and wide receiver Chris Harper into a top-15 pass catcher.

Still, the buzz surrounding Goff and the Cal aerial assault has dropped substantially since Cal’s season debut against Northwestern back on Aug. 31. But it’s worth noting that since the season opener, Goff’s exceptional play — throwing the Oregon game out the window — has been a constant in a minefield of inconsistency. The freshman phenom compiled 371 passing yards and three touchdowns against No. 4 Ohio State and set a school record for passing yards in a game in the loss to Washington State on Saturday.

Goff’s numbers are always going to be inflated due to the high frequency of passing plays called by Dykes and Franklin and because of the high volume of easy throws the system creates. Against the Cougars on Saturday, Dykes and Franklin drew up yet another easy throw for Goff. The result was an 89-yard touchdown to Harper in the second quarter.

On the play, it’s apparent that the Washington State defense simply loses track of Harper. When catching the ball around midfield, the closest Cougar is 10 yards away. From there, Harper’s fleeting speed and game-changing jukes take over as he beats one Washington State safety and then outraces everyone to the end zone.

But that’s not even the fun part of what transpired on this particular play. Harper makes the defense pay after he makes the catch, but Dykes and Franklin’s intricate play design is the real winner.

Going to the tape, Cal is in the shotgun formation with four wide receivers and one running back all available for distribution from Goff. Running back Jeffrey Coprich lines up to Goff’s right and runs a simple route into the flat as the checkdown receiver.

The lone receiver on the left side of the field is Bryce Treggs. The explosive Treggs runs a deep route in the middle-left portion of the field, bringing a cornerback and safety with him. At the onset of the snap and for the majority of the time he holds onto the football, Goff looks Treggs’ way.

On the right side, Cal’s three remaining receivers are organized with two bunched in the slot and one on the right sideline. Typically, Harper would be the one on the right flank, but this time it’s Kenny Lawler, who runs a crossing pattern over the middle of the field. Instead, Harper is positioned as the slot receiver closest to the middle of the field with Jacob Wark on his right. Similar to Lawler, Wark runs a crossing route over the middle, only his is much shallower — only a few yards from the line of scrimmage.

Harper’s route is designed to get him to the sideline and up the field. The sophomore doesn’t cut to the sideline until a few yards past the line of scrimmage. When he does, he quickly about-faces toward the numbers, before turning vertical. Heading north, Harper finds himself isolated just as Goff turns his head away from Treggs. An easy loft by Goff, a breakaway move from Harper, and the duo finds themselves in the record books.

But let’s get back to the play design. By lining up in the middle of the field, Harper is freed from a matchup with one of Washington State’s best corners. And by bunching receivers together in the slot, it makes it easier for a receiver to slip through the secondary, untouched and uncovered. For someone like Harper, who racked up three touchdowns and 24 receptions in the four games prior to Saturday, it’s almost impossible to remain invisible. More often than not, Harper is one of the focal points of Cal’s offense.

The other focal point of Cal’s offense is Treggs. Goff takes advantage of the attention surrounding Treggs on this play by looking off the safety that should have been on Harper’s side of the field.

Instinctively, the Cougar safety follows Goff’s eyes toward Treggs. But because Goff stares down Treggs for almost the entirety of the play, the right side of the field is vacated and left alone for Harper.

Sean Wagner-McGough covers football. Contact him at swagnermcgough@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @seanjwagner.

The post Tale of the Tape: Breaking down Jared Goff’s 89-yard touchdown pass to Chris Harper appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Halfway through the second quarter Saturday, Cal’s defense literally caught what looked like an insanely lucky break.

In a third-and-3 situation for Washington State, Cal junior safety Michael Lowe stepped in front of Connor Halliday’s pass for an interception. As he scrambled to find his footing, his knee grazed the turf. But he leapt up and kept running, all the way to the end zone.

Just as he was about to cross the threshold, Lowe back-flipped into the promised land.

It was the kind of play that Cal’s problem-riddled defense could only dream of this season. It was big. It was momentum-shifting. It would have been the Bears’ first touchdown of the day and cut the Cougars’ lead to two.

Instead, officials reviewed the play and ruled that Lowe’s knee had in fact touched the ground. To add insult to injury for Cal, Lowe received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for celebrating before he crossed into the end zone. The ball was called back, past Cal’s 22-yard line — where Lowe first went down — to the 11.

The fans who were scattered halfheartedly throughout the stands booed as if on cue. Yet the play was so typically Cal — brilliant one second, too good to be true the next — that you have to wonder if it’s even worth it for spectators to get mad.

Cal football isn’t just a spectator sport; rather, it makes sport out of its spectators’ emotions, toying and building up and crushing season dreams with every sloppy fumble.

Berkeley is mercifully not USC, where winning is so demanded that a coach on the hot seat can face a downright disrespectful firing squad in the middle of the night four weeks into the season.

Winning is great in Memorial Stadium, but losing isn’t foreign. Lifers should know better than to feel discouraged over one or two (or, as of now, four) losses. These people probably will die without ever having seen their team in a Rose Bowl. They also (hopefully) have more class than to immolate a man in his first year at the helm.

Still, Saturday’s 44-22 loss to Washington State — a team traditionally called a bottom-dweller, yet one that now has a significantly better record than Cal — heralded the Bears’ ninth-straight loss to an FBS team. That skid (which began, ironically, after the Bears beat the Cougars last October) is the longest of any team in a BCS conference.

After the outing, head coach Sonny Dykes repeated over and over that his team’s confidence is fragile. For young guys inexperienced in the art of losing, a third-straight loss has to be pretty earth-shattering.

“The disappointing thing is that if you look at our team against Northwestern and our team now,” Dykes said, “we haven’t played as good as we have in that game since then.”

Dykes hit the nail on the head there. The season opener against then-No.22 Northwestern was exciting to watch. Since then, though, injuries have ravaged the defensive squad so much that it looks more like 14th-century Europe trying to survive the Black Plague. Repeatedly blown coverage has revealed a basic lack of fundamentals. Two routs in three weeks at the hands of top-five teams crushed whatever confidence Cal might have shored up.

But today showed the Bears that the slip in confidence isn’t relegated to the locker room. It was homecoming weekend in Berkeley, which meant an inundation of alumni and proud parents starting Friday afternoon. But you wouldn’t have been able to tell that if you set foot inside Memorial Stadium on Saturday. The crowd was anemic, with entire sections still nearly empty by the opening kickoff.

At one point, with a little under 11 minutes left in the third quarter, ESPN College Gameday tweeted out, “Is there anything better than a college football Saturday?”

For Cal fans, it looked like the answer was yes.

Annie Gerlach covers football. Contact her at agerlach@dailycal.org

The post Typical Cal on Saturday appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Michael Tao/Senior Staff

On Saturday at Memorial Stadium, the Cal football team’s clash against the Cougars lived up to its billing as a battle of two Pac-12 bottom dwellers.

In a game littered with turnovers and penalties, Washington State (4-2, 2-1 Pac-12) topped the Bears (1-4, 0-2 Pac-12), 44-22, despite quarterback Jared Goff’s school record 504 passing yards and wide receiver Chris Harper’s 216 receiving yards. Against an underperforming secondary, Washington State quarterback Connor Halliday matched Goff’s big day, lighting up the Bears to the tune of 521 yards and three touchdowns.

“Obviously, it wasn’t a good performance by us,” said Cal coach Sonny Dykes. “We turned the ball over five times, fumbled inside their five-yard line twice. You’re not going to win if you do that — it doesn’t matter who you play. That’s not winning football.”

In the end, it was Cal’s two critical red zone mistakes in the first quarter that doomed Sonny Dykes’ first realistic shot at his first Pac-12 win. While the Bears’ turnover issues against Oregon were written off as a casualty of the brutal rainstorm, Cal had no one to blame but itself for its five costly turnovers under the hot California sun on Saturday.

On Cal’s first drive of the game, Goff marched the squad straight down the field, all the way to the Cougars’ five-yard line. But in a scene all too familiar to Cal fans, running back Daniel Lasco botched a handoff exchange from Goff, leading to a Cougar recovery.

Washington State didn’t take long to strike off of the turnover. Completing a 14-point swing in favor of the visiting team, quarterback Connor Halliday connected with Vince Mayle for a 35-yard touchdown pass.

Trailing 7-0, Cal responded with a three and out on its possession. Against a Cal defense on short rest, WSU drove down the field and extended its lead to 14-0. For the third consecutive game, Cal trailed by at least two scores before its offense found the end zone.

On the last play of the first quarter, the Bears appeared to vault themselves back in the game when Goff found wide receiver Richard Rodgers for a 38-yard passing play to the one-yard line. But when the second quarter arrived, the Bears once again found themselves on the wrong end of the fumble. Running back Brendan Bigelow, on third and goal from the one, fumbled away another scoring opportunity right into the hands of Washington State’s Kalafitoni Pole.

“Poor kid just doesn’t have a lot of confidence right now,” Dykes said. “We got to figure out a way to get him some. It’s tough right now to play him, honestly, so we’ll see what happens.”

After Bigelow’s blunder, Cal’s defense responded and awoke the dormant crowd with a stop in the end zone for the safety. With Cougar running back Teondray Caldwell taking a handoff to his right, a pack of Bears, led by DeAndre Coleman, converged on the hapless Cougar to put Cal on the board.

After a Vincent D’Amato field goal cut Washington State’s lead to 14-5, Cal struck gold. On 2nd and 11 from the 11-yard line, wide receiver Chris Harper lined up in the slot with Goff in the shotgun formation. Harper juked his way to the outside, where Goff found him wide open. Harper cut past a Washington State defensive back and scooted into the end zone. The 89-yard hookup between Goff and Harper was the second-longest pass play in school history.

“It was the same play I overthrew him on earlier in the game,” Goff said. “I just didn’t want to let that happen again. He ran a great route, and it was wide open. He just made a play after he caught it.”

Down by just two, the Bears surrendered a backbreaking touchdown with just over a minute left in the first half when Halliday delivered a 68-yard passing strike to running back Marcus Mason. With Cal kicking a field goal to close the half, the Bears entered the locker room down by six, 21-15.

Washington State’s six-point advantage endured until the Cougars tacked on a touchdown with seven and a half minutes into the third. After wide receiver Isiah Myers turned a 10-yard pass from Halliday into a 30-yard gain, Mason rumbled up the middle on the next play for a 10-yard rushing touchdown, pushing the margin to 28-15.

After a turnover on downs by Cal, the Cougars stuck the dagger in the Bears when Halliday found a streaking Mayle over the middle for a 72-yard touchdown. Left in isolation against Mayle, Cal cornerback Isaac Lapite offered little resistance, falling to the turf as Mayle crossed over the goal line.

“Nobody cares about the excuses,” Dykes said. “I could sit out here and give you a litany of excuses, but I’m not going to.We have no confidence right now, and we’re a fragile football team.”

Sean Wagner-McGough covers football. Contact him at swagnermcgough@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @seanjwagner.

The post Cal football falls prey to Washington State in third straight loss appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Anya Schultz/Senior Staff

After a 55-16 shellacking against Oregon at Eugene last week, the Cal football team returns to Berkeley looking for its first Pac-12 win. How will Sonny Dykes fare against his mentor Mike Leach and the Cougars’ Air Raid offense which ranks 14th in the nation in passing offense? Is this a must-win game for Cal?

Also check out our features on four of the newest crop of Cal coaches. How did offensive coordinator Tony Franklin rejuvenate his coaching career after blowing the whistle on his former employer at Kentucky? Like Franklin, how did offensive line coach Zach Yenser bounce back from unemployment? What drives defensive coordinator Andy Buh behind his affable exterior? How does running backs coach Pierre Ingram strive to bring out the best from his players?

The live blog will be presented to you by our 2013 Cal football beat writers Connor Byrne, Annie Gerlach, Michael Rosen and Sean Wagner-McGough.

Kickoff at Memorial Stadium is at 1 p.m.

The post Live blog: Cal football vs Washington State appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Jan Flatley-Feldman/Staff

With a yellow legal pad perched on his lap, Tony Franklin wrote with fury. For 30 days and 30 nights, Franklin returned to that chair on his back porch, desperate to write the story that was certain to doom his career.

“The only way I would be happy was if people knew the whole story,” Franklin said. “I said, ‘Now, if you don’t like me and think I’m a slimeball and you don’t want to hire me, great. But at least it will be based upon the truth. This is what happened, this is my role and this is what I did. Hate me? Great. Don’t hire me. But at least it’s what really happened.’”

After coaching and teaching at several Kentucky high schools for 16 years, Franklin finally landed his dream job in 1998: a position at the University of Kentucky, coaching the running backs. From 1998 to 2000, under legendary offensive guru Hal Mumme, Franklin played an integral part in bringing the Wildcats to back-to-back bowl games for the third time in program history. He had completed an arduous climb to the prestigious ranks of college coaching. But something was wrong.

Franklin watched as other coaches lured recruits and high school coaches with illegal benefits. The whole ordeal didn’t sit well with him. He was faced with a choice: stay quiet and continue to ascend through the SEC coaching ranks, or leave the program. He chose to resign, but simply leaving without talking wasn’t enough.

He decided to write a book, titled “Fourth Down and Life to Go,” highlighting the program’s transgressions in excruciating detail. Nobody would hire him; after the release of the book, Franklin was effectively blacklisted from college football. He had buried himself in an ink-stained coffin.

“I felt grimy,” Franklin said. “I felt dirty. But the only way I could ever feel good is if people knew the whole story.”

Jobless and with no immediate employment prospects evident, Franklin racked his brain for a way to help keep his family financially afloat. The ever-entrepreneurial Franklin asked himself a question: What did he know that people would want to buy?

“And I thought, ‘Well, the offense was pretty good at Kentucky,’ ” Franklin said. “ ‘What if you taught that?’ ”

Franklin sensed flaws in the commonly commodified coaching clinics held all over the South. He disliked the hit-and-miss nature of the clinics, where a few coaches threw out some choice ideas but hardly committed themselves wholeheartedly to fleshing out their personal philosophies.

Franklin chose to do just that. He committed years of offensive wisdom to carefully curated packages. There were videos of basic fundamentals and A-to-Z practice plans. His unique derivation of the then-obscure Air Raid was put on film and marketed as a premium coaching clinic. The former high school teacher brought prospective clients to Kentucky and taught them his lessons directly. Success came slowly for Franklin’s new enterprise, entitled “The Tony Franklin System.”

“I had nine or 10 clients that first year,” Franklin said. “Most of them were friends of mine, doing it because they knew I was broke and I needed money.”

Franklin’s wife, Laura, picked up some of the financial slack in the years immediately after his resignation, but times remained tough. The family stayed in Lexington, unable to rid their minds of the Kentucky fiasco. TV trucks rolled into their driveway, cameramen and anchors in tow, and sprinted to his door to plead for an interview. Laura swore off the Internet — message boards, fan websites and the like — in fear of the backlash.

“It was hard,” Laura says. “It was not a fun time.”

But as the business finally rose, so did the Franklin family’s spirits. Franklin’s client base grew to more than 100 coaches by the third year of the program. The profits covered the family’s expenses.

One day early in 2005, Franklin was sitting in his office when an unfamiliar number popped up on his caller ID. It was a reporter from USA Today, interested in Franklin’s story and his business. When the story ran, Franklin’s business expanded exponentially and caught the attention of Larry Blakeney, the head coach at Troy. He decided to take a shot on Franklin, hiring him as the offensive coordinator.

“If it wasn’t for Larry, I never would’ve had another job,” Franklin says. “But I would do it again. I have zero regrets.”

These days, the up-tempo system Franklin sold 10 years ago to desperate high school coaches searching for any advantage is all the rage in college football.

Franklin claims that close to half of Division I football programs run an up-tempo offense, once considered gimmicky and easily solvable by critics of Franklin in the early 2000s.

Franklin now runs one of the fastest offenses in the country as the offensive coordinator at Cal, 12 years removed from his blacklisting.

“We were playing fast before fast was cool,” Franklin says.

After years of trying to fit his square peg in a round hole, he’s found his niche in the quirky confines of Berkeley, his oft-criticized Air Raid thriving in the California sun.

Michael Rosen covers football. Contact him at mrosen@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @michaelrosen3.

The post Come as you are: Tony Franklin’s return to the gridiron appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Jan Flatley-Feldman/Staff

The first time sophomore linebacker Jalen Jefferson met his new coach, he was thrown.

Defensive coordinator Andy Buh seemed, at first glance, happy — too happy. He was laughing, cracking jokes and constantly smiling.

“I felt like he was too nice of a guy,” Jefferson says. “I was like, ‘This is really our defensive coordinator?’ ”

Beneath the affable exterior, though, intensity burns. As the leader of the Bears’ defense, Buh sometimes echoes traditional coaching stereotypes. He is forever preaching basic fundamentals: Get in your gap, know your assignment, play your game. There’s nothing fancy in his basic 4-3 system.

He prefers not to single out players. There is no one individual, only one team, and all he asks of his team is to be great every day — a rather tall order.

“We’re always one of 11, one of 105,” Buh says. “ ‘Do your one-eleventh,’ that’s what we say.”

At this point, Buh is a little mre than a month into his first season as Cal’s defensive coordinator. For a little more than a month, he has reiterated his mantra of greatness and consistency.

To say it’s been an uphill battle would be an understatement.

Before he even started, he faced a daunting task: to field a sound defense from a young and shallow squad. Buh brought with him a 4-3 scheme new to Memorial Stadium, and the squad’s inexperience showed in its first four games. Add a bevy of injuries in positions with little depth, and the result is a defensive squad that ranks in the bottom five of most major stats nationwide.

But Buh is not worried. Just as Jefferson is not worried. Just as head coach Sonny Dykes isn’t worried.

“You only get good at football by playing football,” Buh says. “I know that to be true.

“When you’re playing as bad as we have played, the only direction we can go is up.”

If Andy Buh weren’t a football coach, he would probably be in law enforcement. Growing up, Buh idolized his father, who was a police officer.

Somehow, he ended up here instead: a defensive coordinator at a school in a major conference, with a lengthy and impressive resume for someone who has barely cracked 40 years of age. He was co-defensive coordinator at Stanford in the Jim Harbaugh era, and this past January, he went to the Rose Bowl with Wisconsin as the linebackers coach.

As a defensive coordinator at Nevada, his alma mater, he took a squad ranked 98th in the nation in total defense and, in one year, launched it up to 54th.

It’s an ascent made all the more impressive by the fact that Buh never played football until he got to high school. For him, there was immediate satisfaction in being a physical part of a team, a cog in a larger machine.

Mostly, he just loved the competition. Even back then, the traditional do-or-die mentality poked through.

“That’s what drove me then, still driving me now,” Buh says. “I love games that we keep scoring in. I love having a winner and a loser.”

It’s a good thing, then, that he’s serving under Dykes, who has engineered a score-fest of an offense thus far in the season.

But this stint in Memorial Stadium was years in the making. Buh’s big break came a year after he graduated from college, when he was paying his dues as a high school coach in his hometown of Escondido, Calif. Nevada called him up and asked whether he wanted to be a graduate assistant for his old team.

“I jumped in the car and did it,” he says. “And I’ve never looked back.”

Only a year and a degree separated him from the players he coached, but it was easy for him to compartmentalize because he wanted to coach so badly.

The job itself, however, was far from easy. Graduate assistants are essentially indentured servants, working long hours for meager stipends. Buh could only dig deeper when he watched his average workday stretch well beyond 13 hours.

“I do distinctly remember sitting there at 2 o’clock in the morning, saying, ‘Is this investment ever going to pay off?’ ” he says.

In the midst of that first year, he knew: This is what he wanted to do with his life. For him, the struggle was only made the more real because it reinforced the values he’d learned on the field.

Never before was consistency, and the desire for greatness, so necessary.

Through that experience, he learned another lesson that he now imparts to his players. If your own visions of grandeur don’t align with what the team needs to be successful, then you push them to the back burner. But you never give up, either.

“Invest everything you have without any guarantees,” he says. “And then banking on your belief that it will happen.”

That lesson has become an unavoidable reality for the Cal defense this year.

“In my career there has never been a string of bad games,” Buh says. “There’s been a bad game here and there, but never a string.”

It’s not that hard to believe him. After all, Cal has, by its own confession, been pretty bad on the defensive end of the ball. In every game, the Bears have fallen into an early hole, allowing the opponent to score on its opening drive. Only once has Cal been able to claw its way out later on for a win — and even then, the opponent was Portland State, an FCS school.

After facing some of the nation’s toughest offensive onslaughts, the Bears have given up 2,050 total yards, with an average of 45.3 points.

Just as Buh has never faced a string of games this bad, he’s also never faced a string of injured players quite this serious.

The depth chart Cal released at the end of spring camp and the list of starters in last week’s game against No. 2 Oregon look like two very different lists, as far as defense goes.

Only three of the tentative starters last spring have continued to hold down their positions through the fall campaign. The rest of the positions have ridden what Buh calls a “merry-go-round of players getting injured.”

“There’s a handful of guys that are learning on the job right now,” Buh says.

He and the assistant coaches act like nothing has changed. By stressing the same lessons each week — everything from alignments to sight lines — the coaching staff hopes fundamentals will sink in through sheer repetition. There’s no room for error; there’s no room to introduce new material.

But according to Jefferson, there is sometimes room for what Buh calls a quick “smile break.” If a player gets too frustrated, Buh reminds him to enjoy the game into which he’s pouring all his effort. Shake off the negativity before concentrating on the fundamentals once more.

It’s a joke Jefferson and his teammates sometimes bounce back at their coach when he gets too mad.

“We say, ‘Coach, take a smile break,’ ” Jefferson says. “He smirks a little bit, and that loosens him up.”

The game is a constant ebb and flow for Buh. There are wins and — at this point — mostly losses. There is consistency, which in turn leads to greatness.

But for a guy who’s always smiling, there’s still time for that, too.

Annie Gerlach covers football. Contact her at agerlach@dailycal.org

The post Smile Like You Mean It: Andy Buh and the truth of his affable exterior appeared first on The Daily Californian.